As scientists, we don’t just want to encourage data sharing — we want to measure it

As scientists, we don’t just want to encourage data sharing — we want to measure it

Written by
Kate Hodesdon in

Uncategorized

on
July 9th, 2015

There is a lot of talk of incentivizing data sharing in science, but which practices in particular do we want to encourage? At Seven Bridges, we have been thinking of how to design a metric that tracks the kinds of data sharing that most benefit science.

Simply being a prolific sharer is useless if the quality or relevance of the data is poor. And sharing high-quality data is not helpful if it you store it in an insecure repository, or an obscure format. Clarifying best practices of data sharing will help us maximize the value of shared data, but it can also play another important role of helping to incentivize data sharing.

The notion of a h-index for data sharing grew out of a conversation between Deniz Kural of Seven Bridges Genomics and Adam Resnick (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia). I wrote up some thoughts on this inThe Sharers’ Leaderboard: an h-index for data sharing as a guest post for DNAdigest.